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> generally its the philosophers that are presumptuous enough to tell other fields what they should do or think I'm sorry but in my experience, this is not at

> generally its the philosophers that are presumptuous enough to tell other fields what they should do or think I'm sorry but in my experience, this is not at all a one-way street. It is very common for me to hear engineers and other STEM-types to complain about modern art or about the supposedly obscurantist, sophistic style of various disciplines of the liberal arts. However, these complaints rarely come from Engineers who take an active interest in the fields they criticize. Admittedly I'm mainly speaking about general people I work with or whom I (sadly often) encounter on the internet. But there are some eminent names who are just as guilty. In addition to Kaku, as bakuninsbart mentioned, I could also bring up, off the top of my head, Stephen "philosophy is dead" Hawking and Richard "Shakespeare would have been better if he were educated" Dawkins. I think I could come up with many more examples if I started looking. On the other hand, we fortunately also have people like Murray Gell-Man, who has gotten us to quote from the most experimental book in all of English-language literature every time we talk about elementary sub-atomic particles.

a9h74j 5y ago
Based upon minimal, but seemingly enough observation, I'd add Kraus to the list of philistines.
normac2 5y ago
> supposedly obscurantist, sophistic style of various disciplines of the liberal arts. Would you say there is absolutely no kernel of truth to this? Check out, say, the abstract to this paper [1]. Is there nothing obscurantist about it? If you acknowledge that it's obscurantist to some degree, would you say that it's rare and I just cherry-picked a bad one? I'm a STEM person, and I have trouble understanding why some people find this stuff to be just reasonable academic work with nothing dysfunctional, pedantic or sophistic about the writing style. It just seems so extremely obvious to me, that it makes me wonder if the people into this stuff simply have nervous systems that are wired a bit differently, and I'm falling prey to the typical mind fallacy. It's hard to believe that if I studied this stuff deeply enough and with an open mind, it would no longer seem obscure. [1] https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI3193887/ https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI3193887/
- voidhorse 5y ago
  While one could argue that the abstract you linked is not well written, I do not think it’s obscurantist by any means. It’s a dissertation, so it’s not surprising they are using the jargon of the field and citing important works. All academic literature is specialist literature. If you aren’t trained in the field you likely won’t understand it. It’s totally reasonable to me that a STEM person would have no idea what this abstract is saying just as a Humanities person probably couldn’t make heads or tails of the abstract of a dissertation on category theory or on a particular branch of computer science. I find it funny that STEM folks always go after humanities academics for being obtuse when its just a matter of the pot calling the kettle black—dense STEM research and theory uses language that’d be considered equally obtuse to the untrained reader.
  - normac2 5y ago
    To me, it goes beyond being hard to read, and I take it as obscurantist in the strictest sense of someone going out of their way to be hard to understand. I have a theory that most STEM people simply don't think like most humanities people, literally at a neurological level. (I edited my post to add some thoughts around that, possibly after you replied.) STEM work rarely comes off that way to me. The only time it looks to me like the person is going out of their way to be obtuse and technical, is some higher math stuff (which is a known thing and acknowledged even by some mathematicians). This includes the stuff from entirely different parts of STEM that I don't understand at all.
    - voidhorse 5y ago
      That’s fair. I would agree there is a certain “big words == more intellectual == smarter” or “more difficult == smarter” fallacy that arises somewhat frequently in contemporary humanities papers. I think part of it might originate from the fact that the abstractions used for talking about things in the humanities aren’t fixed as well as they are in science. Take the abstract in question for example—the writer uses the palimpsest as a sort of visual analogue and abstraction to try to describe interactions and relationships between texts/narratives—while it’s not an absurd metaphor, it’s difficult to grok, because there is no real standardized metaphor for describing this set of relationships. You could argue the object of study isn’t as well defined as it is in the sciences where we have fairly standardized abstractions like “waveform” etc. that make it a lost easier to talk about things clearly.

a9h74j 5y ago

Based upon minimal, but seemingly enough observation, I'd add Kraus to the list of philistines.

normac2 5y ago

> supposedly obscurantist, sophistic style of various disciplines of the liberal arts. Would you say there is absolutely no kernel of truth to this? Check out, say, the abstract to this paper [1]. Is there nothing obscurantist about it? If you acknowledge that it's obscurantist to some degree, would you say that it's rare and I just cherry-picked a bad one? I'm a STEM person, and I have trouble understanding why some people find this stuff to be just reasonable academic work with nothing dysfunctional, pedantic or sophistic about the writing style. It just seems so extremely obvious to me, that it makes me wonder if the people into this stuff simply have nervous systems that are wired a bit differently, and I'm falling prey to the typical mind fallacy. It's hard to believe that if I studied this stuff deeply enough and with an open mind, it would no longer seem obscure. [1] https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI3193887/ https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI3193887/

voidhorse 5y ago
While one could argue that the abstract you linked is not well written, I do not think it’s obscurantist by any means. It’s a dissertation, so it’s not surprising they are using the jargon of the field and citing important works. All academic literature is specialist literature. If you aren’t trained in the field you likely won’t understand it. It’s totally reasonable to me that a STEM person would have no idea what this abstract is saying just as a Humanities person probably couldn’t make heads or tails of the abstract of a dissertation on category theory or on a particular branch of computer science. I find it funny that STEM folks always go after humanities academics for being obtuse when its just a matter of the pot calling the kettle black—dense STEM research and theory uses language that’d be considered equally obtuse to the untrained reader.
- normac2 5y ago
  To me, it goes beyond being hard to read, and I take it as obscurantist in the strictest sense of someone going out of their way to be hard to understand. I have a theory that most STEM people simply don't think like most humanities people, literally at a neurological level. (I edited my post to add some thoughts around that, possibly after you replied.) STEM work rarely comes off that way to me. The only time it looks to me like the person is going out of their way to be obtuse and technical, is some higher math stuff (which is a known thing and acknowledged even by some mathematicians). This includes the stuff from entirely different parts of STEM that I don't understand at all.
  - voidhorse 5y ago
    That’s fair. I would agree there is a certain “big words == more intellectual == smarter” or “more difficult == smarter” fallacy that arises somewhat frequently in contemporary humanities papers. I think part of it might originate from the fact that the abstractions used for talking about things in the humanities aren’t fixed as well as they are in science. Take the abstract in question for example—the writer uses the palimpsest as a sort of visual analogue and abstraction to try to describe interactions and relationships between texts/narratives—while it’s not an absurd metaphor, it’s difficult to grok, because there is no real standardized metaphor for describing this set of relationships. You could argue the object of study isn’t as well defined as it is in the sciences where we have fairly standardized abstractions like “waveform” etc. that make it a lost easier to talk about things clearly.